Email marketing is so 2011. But is it? Email marketing has slowly been pushed to the side making way for social media marketing. Social marketing is important, but email marketing is an effective way to reach your audience. Using the two in conjunction you can capitalize on both of their strengths.

2 MIN READ // June 27, 2011

Email Marketing is so 2011

It seems that, in the last couple of years, email marketing has slowly been pushed to the side to make way for social media marketing. And, while I think social marketing is incredibly important, I also think email marketing is still an effective and relatively inexpensive way to reach your audience. Social media requires that a user seek out information whereas emails are delivered directly to the user. By using the two in conjunction you can capitalize on both of their strengths and grow your audience.

So how can social media and email work together to grow your business?

One way is to have an email/newsletter tab on your company’s Facebook Page. Retailer South Moon Under has a section on their page where they ask users to submit their email address to be added to their list. This is a great way to build your email list using social media. To build on this idea, I'd update the image to talk about the payoff for signing up, maybe with a discount offer. This will be more incentive for a customer to give his or her email address.

On the other end, you have an opportunity to increase your social media presence through email by simply including social media icons in the email. Consumers can ‘Like’ a promotion, Tweet the offer, share with friends, etc. If you want to really grow your online presence, you can actually promote your Facebook, Twitter, or any other social platform in your email, even offering discounts for joining your social campaign. Again, this is a really easy and inexpensive way to grow your fan base.

So while businesses continue to move towards social media, remember that email marketing continues to be an effective marketing tool and can work with social media to help grow your client base.

5 things to remember when you create your email:

Subject Line – This is the most important part of your email and usually the part that is given the least attention. If your subject doesn’t grab the reader’s attention, they won’t open the email and, as quickly as you hit send, they’ve hit delete.

Call to action – make sure the reader knows what you want them to do. Make sure the call to action is clear and easy to find.

Mobile Devices – With the number of people viewing emails on their smartphones on the rise, it’s important to always remember to include the ability to view the email on a mobile device.

Images – remember that some email services require you to download images, so if you create an email that is one large image and the user doesn’t download it, they’ll be surprised when they open the email and there isn’t much content!

Testing – conduct A/B tests to see which headlines or calls to action work best or which day is best to send it out so that you can optimize moving forward.